WILL WHINY BABY LEAD GEN Z TO WINE UP?
Or is it Yet Another Iteration of Mateus?
BY ALAN GOLDFARB
Sept. 10, 2024
Whenever my grandkids – ages 13/10 – utter something sweet or funny that I think is nevertheless naive, silly, or just plain unclear on the concept, I try and catch myself up. “Did I say things like that when I was their age?” Or, “Was I that naïve and/or was the nuance so elusive that I simply didn’t get it? Likely. Probably. Yes, sure.
Therefore, I introduce this column from my lofty position of age/experience. Subhead: I know everything. Which makes me a Maven or One who thinks he knows everything. Everything there is to know about wine, that is. Likely? Probably? Not a chance.
What has prompted me to get on my high horse is Esther Mobley’s honest report on a new category of wine labeled Whiny Baby. As Ms. Mobley so ably wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Did I mention they’re (the wines) sweet? To me, the wines taste cloying.”
Whiny Baby is promulgated by, I think/hope, a sincere young woman who seems to have been shot out of a cannon and into the wine business. The labels of Whiny Baby are aimed at GenZers, which resemble fruit juice (the bottles, not the GZers); and are priced at 18 bucks. That’s some hi-falutin’ juice.
The point of the project – aside from making a few shekels – is that maybe Whiny Baby wine will become a gateway to more serious wine for a generation which from every viewpoint, seems not to be interested in the stuff. But as the producer told Mobley in the last line of the piece, “… even my (italics mine) palate has started to develop and grow.”
The unsaid aspirational takeaway is that Whiny Baby – like Mateus and Lancer’s, Boone’s Farm and White Zinfandel before – is going to lead its consumers to better wine.
I think my first wine –ones that I drank on my own and not at dinners with the Italian half of my family – was Mateus or was it Lancer’s?. Drinking them, which were essentially white zin (actually, a blend of Portuguese grapes) in a flask-like bottle or in an attractive terracotta crock bottle – I and my friends thought we were hip and sopahisticated. Especially when we poured them from a foot away coaxed through a bota bag.
Lancer’s and Mateus did not make me love wine.
I drank them because it was de rigueur for a 20-something kid to drink these sweet elixirs, especially at outdoor concerts, maybe along with a spliff, to get high and to better enjoy the music.
I was lucky and perhaps a bit unusual for a kid growing up in Brooklyn, to be exposed early on to better wine; always Italian, some of which were those old Chiantis wrapped in fiascoes. That’s because my aunt was a wonderful Italian cook and my Italian uncle and his father and brother made wine in their basement from grapes shipped via train, from Sonoma County.
My family allowed me sips of the wine, which I somehow intuitively thought made me worldly; and which by extension, made me think I was a man, though I was 10 or 12. Years later, when I began to date, when most guys would take their dates to the movies, I would take mine to dinner. You couldn’t talk to each other at a movie. Besides I thought, a dinner was much more romantic, which might lead to something, if you know what I mean. It never did – in those daze – although trying harder, I would sometimes order a Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Somehow I knew how to pronounce it, but didn’t have any idea what it was. But it made for a fine “line”. It was perhaps a sign of sophistication, one though that usually only led to a few kisses, which were indeed very nice, nonetheless.
It wasn’t until I arrived on these shores on the West Coast and after about 15 years as a sportswriter, did I cross over and begin writing about wine. I knew that the No. 1 sport here, was wine & food.
I began collecting wine, studying it, tasting it and spending a lot of time in vineyards and cellars around the world. I quickly inculcated wines’ history, wines’ science, wines’ place in the world – and in mine.
Mateus and Lancer’s served its purpose, just as I suppose Whiny Baby might several generations later. But as with the former, the latter I’m afraid, won’t instill a sense of somewhere-ness in the world other than one’s own, to most of the GenZers, who might swig it. To do that, there needs to be context. And unless you’re a 20-something lucky enough to know someone who knows something about the historical place in the world that wine has, Whiny Baby will likely just serve the one who is making it and profiting off it. Although some I suppose, will enjoy it.